Britten, (Edward) Benjamin

Britten, (Edward) Benjamin ( Lord Britten of Aldeburgh) (b Lowestoft, 1913; d Aldeburgh, 1976). Eng. composer, pianist, conductor. His birth on St Cecilia's Day, 22 Nov., was a happy augury for the career of one of Britain's greatest composers. Essentially a vocal composer, his operas and song-cycles won wide int. acceptance. He never abandoned the principles of tonality and was a ‘modern’ composer who reached a mass audience and a conservative whose originality no radical would sensibly deny. He shared with his predecessors Parry, Vaughan Williams, and Holst, an intense interest in the work of amateurs and children. His brilliant gifts as a pianist and cond., coupled with the virtuoso nature of his inventiveness, also led him to compose mus. for great performers such as the cellist Rostropovich and the singers Vishnevskaya, Fischer-Dieskau, and Janet Baker. The greatest personal influence on his mus. was his friendship with the tenor Peter Pears, for whom he comp. many operatic and vocal roles.

Britten's mus. gifts became apparent at an early stage. In sch. holidays he had lessons from Harold Samuel (pf.) and Frank Bridge (comp.); the influence of Bridge in particular was strong and lasting. Britten was at RCM 1930–3, but found mus. atmosphere uncongenial and resented official refusal to allow him to study with Berg in Vienna. Studied pf. with Benjamin and comp. with Ireland. His astonishing early works were pubd., incl. the Sinfonietta and A Boy was Born, and his song-cycle with orch. Our Hunting Fathers (text compiled and partly written by Auden) was perf. at Norwich Fest. 1936. He worked for the G.P.O. Film Unit, writing mus. for a dozen short documentaries, the best known being Coal Face and Night Mail (both 1936). In 1937, for the Boyd Neel String Orch.'s concert at the Salzburg Fest., he wrote the Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge. He and Pears followed their friend the poet Auden to N. Amer. in 1939, staying until 1942. While in NY, f.ps. of his Vn. Conc. (1939) and Sinfonia da Requiem (1940) were given in Carnegie Hall under Barbirolli. Returning to Eng., Britten settled at Snape and Aldeburgh, Suffolk. His opera Peter Grimes was perf. at SW on 7 June 1945, a day of importance for Eng. mus. comparable with the f.p. of Elgar's Enigma Variations in June 1899. His interest in chamber opera led in 1947 to foundation of the EOG (later EMT) and his desire for a fest. rooted in Eng. village life and the work of amateurs yet capable of enticing int. performers led to the Aldeburgh Festival, first held in 1948. Thereafter his career was uneventful outwardly except for the prolific output of works of all kinds, in many of which he took part as cond. or pianist. He excelled not only in his own mus.: as an accompanist in Schubert he was second to none (Salzburg Fest. 1952, recital with Pears), he played and cond. Mozart superbly, and cond. major works by Bach, Mahler, Elgar, Schumann, and others. The Aldeburgh Fest. also featured neglected works by composers whom Britten and his colleagues deemed to deserve reappraisal. After a major heart operation in 1973 his activities were much reduced. CH 1953, OM 1965. First composer to be created life peer ( Lord Britten of Aldeburgh, 1976). ( Lord Berners was a hereditary peer.)

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Britten, Benjamin

Benjamin Britten

Composer, conductor, and pianist Benjamin Britten was a giant of mid-twentieth-century British music. The creator of War Requiem, one of the most performed pieces of classical music, he wrote an important body of songs for amateurs and, perhaps most importantly, revived modern British opera. Britten’s operas dealt with themes of compassion, individualism, and threatened innocence. He composed music “in a style noted for its melodic thrust, leanness, and characteristic sound,” according to the Christian Science Monitor. Although casual listeners might identify his dissonant passages as modern, the New York Times observed that he “never embraced the more controversial musical fashions of his time.”

The slim, curly-haired Britten was, according to Publishers Weekly, “at once gentle and cruel, shy and ruthless, sexually timid and fiercely loving, a good friend and a severe enemy.” Born Edward Benjamin Britten on November 22, 1913, in Lowestoft, England, he learned piano early and composed prolifically beginning at the age of five. When his parents brought him to England’s Norwich Festival in 1924, he impressed composer Frank Bridge, who took him on as a pupil and encouraged him to look beyond Great Britain’s borders to such continental composers as Béla Bartok and Arnold Schoenberg.

In the early 1930s Britten studied at the Royal College of Music. In 1935 he was hired by the British General Post Office to provide music for a series of documentary films. According to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, he had to satisfy the “highly particularized yet diverse demands” of film and in doing so he cultivated “the expressive immediacy and technical aptitude that were to distinguish his operatic work.”

On the film set, Britten also met poet W. H. Auden, who was writing scripts. Britten and Auden became friends and decided to collaborate outside the studio. They launched into social and political commentary with the 1936 song cycle Our Hunting Fathers, and in 1939 they collaborated on the choral work Ballad of Heroes.

With the advent of World War II, Britten and a companion, tenor Peter Pears, traveled to Brooklyn, New York. Outside his native country, Britten freed himself from his musical inhibitions. He used text by the French poet Rimbaud to create the song cycle Les Illuminations, which the Washington Post called “one of his finest.” He also set the sonnets of sixteenth-century Italian artist Michelangelo to music and in 1941 collaborated with librettist Auden on the opera Paul Bunyan.

After two years in the United States Britten began to miss his native country and in 1941 decided to go home. “I had become without roots,” he recalled in his acceptance

Born Edward Benjamin Britten, November 22,1913, in Lowestoft, England; died December 4, 1976, in Aldeburgh, England; son of Robert (a dentist) and Edith Rhoda (an amateur singer) Britten. Education: Attended Royal College of Music, London, 1930.

Wrote scores for documentary films, 1934-37; moved to U.S., 1939; returned to England, 1941, and worked for the propaganda division of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC); founded English Opera Group and staged the Rape of Lucretia, 1946, Albert Herring, 1947, and a reworking of The Beggar’s Opera, 1948; founded a music festival in Aldeburgh, 1948; composed opera for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, 1953; staged the War Requiem, 1962; New York City’s Metropolitan Opera performed Death in Venice, 1974.

speech for his 1964 Aspen Award, as quoted in the Washington Post, “and when I got back to England… I was ready to put them down.” During the remainder of the war, Britten wrote music for British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) broadcasts, gave concerts, and refined his command of setting British verse to music.

With the end of the war, Britten’s career took off. On June 7, 1945, his opera Peter Grimes debuted at the Sadler’s Wells Theater. Grimes was an immediate success, and it established Britten as a well-received music dramatist. Many critics were impressed by Britten but some pointed out his “dazzling technical facility [and dismissed] him as a clever but superficial artist,” noted the New York Times.

Britten produced many compositions through the late 1940s. He set poet John Donne’s sonnets to music and wrote a Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, which the Washington Post called “witty,”“ingenious,” and “one of the most popular orchestral compositions of the 20th century.” Britten also penned the St. Nicholas contata and produced his Spring Symphony.

Britten’s operatic output, however, was limited by Great Britain’s lack of support for that art form. His 1946 Rape of Lucretia and 1947 comedy Albert Herring had to be performed in concert with a small ensemble of singers. To remedy this situation and to promote modern British opera, Britten helped form the English Opera Group. In 1948 he and Pears moved from London back to his native region of East Anglia, where they founded the Aldeburgh Festival. The English Opera Group in effect became the house opera company at Aldeburgh, and Britten devoted much of the remainder of his life to writing music for Aldeburgh.

Throughout the 1950s Britten “was inspired by the art and voice of the remarkable English tenor, Peter Pears,” according to the Washington Post. Concentrating on opera in 1951, Britten wrote Billy Budd for the Festival of Britain. When Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, he presented Gloriana, a largely unsuccessful study of Queen Elizabeth I. In 1954 he offered the chamber opera The Turn of the Screw at the Venice Biennale and in 1960 created an operatic score for William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

On May 30, 1962, Britten debuted his War Requiem at the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral. The church had been bombed out during World War II and Britten conceived the Requiem as a great prayer for peace. For his text, he chose a mixture of the Latin Mass for the Dead and the poems of Wilfred Owen, a young English soldier who had been killed in World War I. The Requiem was an instant success with the British public and its appearance marked a second peak in Britten’s public esteem.

Also in the early 1960s, Britten established a fruitful partnership with Russian cellist Mistislav Rostropovich. The two produced a cello symphony in 1963 and in 1965 completed a song cycle, The Poet’s Echo, inspired by a group of poems by Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin. Turning in another direction toward the end of the decade, Britten wrote the quasi-operatic parables Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace, and The Prodigal Son, which grew out of his “dual fascination with Japanese classic drama and the rituals of medieval Christianity,” according to the New York Times.

With the opening of a new larger concert hall at Aldeburgh in 1967, Britten’s prowess as a conductor was further recognized. Despite his lack of enthusiasm about conducting, he “consistently touched an intangible” when leading orchestras, as noted in the Christian Science Monitor. Britten’s extensive library of recordings, of both his own works and works by composers Elgar, Bach, Schubert, and Schumann, was called “one of the great treasuries of contemporary music” by the Washington Post.

Britten remained active into the early 1970s, producing Owen Wingrave, an opera for television, and Death inVenice, the only opera he wrote expressly for Aldeburgh. In 1973 he underwent extensive open heart surgery and never fully recovered. He died at his home in Aldeburgh on December 4, 1976.

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Benjamin Britten

Encyclopedia of World Biography
COPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc.

Benjamin Britten

The English composer, pianist, and conductor Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) revitalized English opera after 1945.

Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, Benjamin Britten had a normal preparatory school education, at the same time studying with some of the best musicians in England. At the age of 16 he entered the Royal College of Music on a scholarship. By then he had already composed a large quantity of music, and before long he was represented in print with the publication of the Sinfonietta for chamber orchestra, written when he was 19.

Prior to World War II Britten furnished music for a number of plays and documentary films. He also continued with other composing, the most prominent item being the Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge (1937), his first
major success. He lived in the United States from 1939 to 1942. Despite the turmoil of war, the period from 1939 to 1945 was a highly creative one for him, climaxed by the production of his opera Peter Grimes (1945). A year later Britten helped to form the English Opera Company, devoted to the production of chamber opera and in 1948 he founded the summer festival at Aldeburgh, where he made his home. He performed frequently in public as pianist and conductor.

Britten's performance skills were impressive, but even more so were the amount and variety of music he composed. Early in his career he wrote a moderate amount of solo and ensemble music for instruments, among which is The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), comprising variations and fugue on a theme by Henry Purcell, and later he composed several big works for the cello. Quite in the British tradition, though, music employing voices far outweighs the purely instrumental in his output. He wrote over 100 songs, mainly organized in the form of song cycles or solo cantatas, which he called "canticles," and he made arrangements of several volumes of folk songs. Representative examples are the excellent Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings (1943); Canticle No. 3, Still Falls the Rain (1954); and The Poet's Echo (1967), six songs to poems of Aleksandr Pushkin. Complementing the solo pieces for voice are numerous large works involving chorus, such as A Ceremony of Carols (1942), the Spring Symphony (1949), the Cantata Academica (1960), and especially the War Requiem (1962), which are among his best and most popular compositions.

But it is his operas that carried Britten's name farthest. Beginning rather poorly with Paul Bunyan (1941), he made
a spectacular turnabout with Peter Grimes. Following these operas came two chamber operas, The Rape of Lucretia (1946) and Albert Herring (1947); a new version of The Beggar's Opera (1948); Let's Make an Opera (1949), a work for children; Billy Budd (1951); Gloriana (1953), written for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; The Turn of the Screw (1954); A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960); and three dramatized parables for church performance. While by no means uniformly successful, they represent the most sustained and influential attempt by an Englishman to create an English repertory since the time of Purcell.

With so much music to his credit, Britten must certainly be counted among the most fluent of modern composers. He is also one of the least problematical. Leaving polemics and innovation to others, he settled for a conservative tonal idiom that offers few surprises in vocabulary, textures, or formal organization. His roots are strongly in the English past, centering on Purcell and earlier composers of the Elizabethan and Tudor periods. From Purcell, Britten said he learned how to set English words to music. From this source he also may have derived his attachment to vocal music, including opera, as well as his preference for baroque forms, such as the suite and the theme and variations. Britten's strengths are his masterful handling of choral sonorities, alone or in conjunction with instruments, his imaginative treatment of the word-music relationship, his sharp sense for the immediate theatrical effect, and his unusual interest and skill in writing music for children.

Britten's example stimulated English composition, particularly in the operatic field, as it had not been stirred for ages. The United States recognized his contributions to music when, in 1963, he was the first winner of the $30,000 Robert O. Anderson Award in the Humanities.

In addition to being remembered for his compositions, Britten also gained fame as an accompanist and as a conductor. In 1976 he was declared a life peer (the granting of a non-hereditary title of nobility in Great Britain). He died later that year.

Further Reading

The most recent study of Britten is Mervyn Cooke Britten and the Far East, Boydell & Brewer, 1997. Other recent sources are Peter J. Hodgson Benjamin Britten: A Guide to Research, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996; and Peter Evans The Music of Benjamin Britten, Oxford University Press, 1996. Hans Keller and Donald Mitchell, eds., Benjamin Britten: A Commentary on His Works from a Group of Specialists (1952), is somewhat lavish in its praise but otherwise gives illuminating remarks on Britten's first 40 years. A good general treatment of his works is Patricia Howard, The Operas of Benjamin Britten: An Introduction (1969). There is a chapter on Britten in Joseph Machlis, Introduction to Contemporary Music (1961). Eric Salzman, Twentieth Century Music: An Introduction (1967), provides a good general survey of Britten's period. R. Murray Schafer, British Composers in Interview (1963), is a revealing exposition of the tastes and ideas of Britten and his contemporaries. □

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Britten, Benjamin, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

Copyright The Columbia University Press

Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh, 1913–76, English composer. Britten's most characteristic expression is found in his vocal music, much of which was written for his partner, the tenor Sir Peter Pears. His many song cycles and choral works include A Boy Was Born (1933) and A Ceremony of Carols (1942). Britten's great War Requiem (1962), setting the bitter war poems of Wilfred Owen, was first performed at the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, built beside the ruins of the old, destroyed during World War II. In his operas, which include Paul Bunyan (1941), Peter Grimes (1945), The Rape of Lucretia (1946), The Beggar's Opera (1948), Billy Budd (1951), The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), and Death in Venice (1973), he displayed a sensitivity to text and a fondness for variation techniques, dynamic dissonance, and the use of ground basses. Britten's instrumental works, some composed when he was a youth, display considerable technical brilliance and colorful orchestration. A notable and popular example, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), written for a film, is based on a theme by Purcell. He was created a life peer in 1976.

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Britten, Benjamin

Britten, Benjamin (1913–76). The most distinguished English composer of his generation, Britten showed original talent from an early age. Educated at the Royal College of Music (London), he was impatient with the parochialism of much English musical life, though his roots were firmly in East Anglia, where he had his home for 30 years. In 1945 Britten's opera Peter Grimes was premièred in London. Its impact was remarkable: Britten had written an opera which quickly established itself in the international repertoire and which combined a distinctively modern style with the ability to appeal to the general musical public. Thereafter Britten's prolific output demonstrated his fluency in writing for the human voice and his capacity to match musical subtlety with psychological insight. A brilliant pianist, Britten's commitment to musical performance was reflected in the foundation of the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948. He was created a life peer in 1976.

John W. Derry

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Britten, (Edward) Benjamin

Britten, (Edward) Benjamin (1913–76) English composer. He is best known for his operas, which rank him among the foremost composers of the 20th century. He also wrote numerous songs, many especially for Peter Pears. Britten's operas include Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951), The Turn of the Screw (1954), and Death in Venice (1973). Other works include the popular Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945) and War Requiem (1962). In 1948, he established the music festival held annually at his home town of Aldeburgh, on the e coast of England. He was made a peer in 1976.

http://www.musicweb.uk.net/britten

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